," he said to the prelates, lords, knights,
and burgesses gathered round him, "I thank God and you, spiritual and
temporal, and all estates of the land; and do you to wit it is not my will
that any man think that by way of conquest I would disinherit any of his
heritage, franchises, or other rights that he ought to have, nor put him
out of the good that he has and has had by the good laws and customs of
the realm, except those persons that have been against the good purpose
and the common profit of the realm."

[Sidenote: Statute of Heresy]

The deposition of a king, the setting aside of one claimant and the
elevation of another to the throne, marked the triumph of the English
Parliament over the monarchy. The struggle of the Edwards against its
gradual advance had culminated in the bold effort of Richard the Second to
supersede it by a commission dependent on the Crown. But the House of
Lancaster was precluded by its very position from any renewal of the
struggle. It was not merely that the exhaustion of the treasury by the war
and revolt which followed Henry's accession left him even more than the
kings who had gone before in the hands of the Estates; it was that his
very right to the Crown lay in an acknowledgement of their highest
pretensions. He had been raised to the throne by a Parliamentary
revolution. His claim to obedience had throughout to rest on a
Parliamentary title. During no period of our early history therefore were
the powers of the two Houses so frankly recognized. The tone of Henry the
Fourth till the very close of his reign is that of humble compliance in
all but ecclesiastical matters with the prayers of the Parliament, and
even his imperious successor shrank almost with timidity from any conflict
with it. But the Crown had been bought by pledges less noble than this.
Arundel was not only the representative of constitutional rule; he was
also the representative of religious persecution. No prelate had been so
bitter a foe of the Lollards, and the support which the Church had given
to the recent revolution had no doubt sprung from its belief that a
sovereign whom Arundel placed on the throne would deal pitilessly with the
growing heresy. The expectations of the clergy were soon realized. In the
first Convocation of his reign Henry declared himself the protector of the
Church and ordered the prelates to take measures for the suppression of
heresy and of the wandering preachers. His declaration was